emusonacid! legacy

Seeing as my last post/poll has proved so popular I thought I'd start a wishlist in the hope that E--MU might take notice?!@#.

1) More plug--ins for the RFX
2) Continuing development of EOS
3) Sysex fully implemented for the RFX

Consider this a sort of petition that Steve Hoge may be interested in and may be used to engender some action from E--MU on the hardware front. The company needs to know that there is still loyal band of E--MU hardware users and that we really need ongoing support despite a downturn in hardware sales. To borrow from Charlton Heston: "From my cold, dead hands!"

I have great faith in Zeos...Paul Muon is doing a great job and needs our support to once again make the E--MU king (if it ever moved down the sampler heirarchy anyway...)

I'd love to see real-time timestretching. Imaging being able to control that with a knob... drool.

More plugs for RFX is essential. Better distortions, for example. An OS that can run the compressor would be nice.

A bit more flexible looping. Back-and-forth looping would be incredibly cool, especially if you could set up an envelope to run back and forth along with it.

And in the dream category:

Firewire. You could run MIDI, audio and sample transfer over one cable, if you cared to.

Replace the age-old CPU with a modern 2GHz processor Not that I've ever noticed any lack of processing power, but think of the possibilities...

i would like to be able to set up multiple filters on a sample. like have a lowpass filter being controlled by midi a, high pass controlled by midi b, and a band pass controlled by midi c. that would be nice if they could do that because then i wont have to have three different presets and i wont have to do program changes. also, it would be interesting to see what kind of effects one would get by doing all the filters at the same time.

more envelopes. and perhaps a set sequencer type thing. you know, so you can do like a sixteen section sequence over a sound, kind of like an envelope, but with more control. i have seen this on some synths.

and maybe some controller options like a theremin type thing, or that ring and bar thing the use to have. you pushed a button to make the sound louder, and you moved this ring on a bar to control pitch. it would be really cool if one could hook a controller like that up to the emu and create glides like that.

better effects would be good. i would like to beable to assign different effects on each channel. completely different effects on each channel. this only having four subs doesn't really work all that well for me. i would like to have preset specific effects, each preset could have it's own reverb, or chorous or distortion and so on.

drop that transmorgifier thing and lets have a 40 band vocoder on the machine. if we are going to do the vocoding thing, lets do it right.

realtime timestretching would be cool, and while we are at it, lets have a cord that makes samples go backwards on the fly. so instead of having two copies of say, your drums, all you would need is one.

would also like better audio editing filters on the emu, perhaps a parametic eq that has a bit steeper slope on it. when the q is set to 1 hz, it actualy means, 1 octave. phase linear filter is cool, but can be time consuming. so lets have 5 band parametric eq, some steeper shelving type filters, maybe a 48 db or if we could have it 96 db roll off per octave. faster processing times. and while we are at it. have a either a real time spectral analyer on it, or at least one that is simular to wave lab, or sound forge. it would be nice to know where my kick is before i record, so if it is in the same area as my bass, then i could make adjustments before i record. that alone would save time. they could do the spectral analyzer like this. you go into tools, hit spectral analyzer and then you could chose to process a sample or actualy play a sequence on the keyboard and it would analyze it for you. so if you wanted, you could play your kick drum sample and that would trigger the analyzer. that way, i don't have to record in to wave lab just to get it analyzed. this would save time.

these are just my ideas. these are all things i would like to make things go faster for me. or options i would like.

oh and perhaps have a vocal processor type thing on the sampler like the antares thing. or what ever it is called. that would be neat too.

anyway, waking up now....

sampleandhold wrote: i would like to be able to set up multiple filters on a sample. like have a lowpass filter being controlled by midi a, high pass controlled by midi b, and a band pass controlled by midi c. that would be nice if they could do that because then i wont have to have three different presets and i wont have to do program changes. also, it would be interesting to see what kind of effects one would get by doing all the filters at the same time.

i hear you on that! you can try this work around for now: if you got RFX use the low pass and high pass in stereo grungelizer. or send the sound out on a seperate output and the in again as a seperate input processing it live through the z-plane filters. if you got adat out from rfx you won't loose any sound quality.

sampleandhold wrote:better effects would be good. i would like to be able to assign different effects on each channel. completely different effects on each channel. this only having four subs doesn't really work all that well for me. i would like to have preset specific effects, each preset could have it's own reverb, or chorous or distortion and so on.

you can assign effects on each channel if you got rfx. you can combine that with routing on at voice level aswell. also each preset can have it's own reverb etc. though you are limitied to 12 different effect busses, if that can be called a limitiation.
sounds to me you wnat rfx :) go get it, it's awesome, and cheap these days. check with emu.com!

emugonzo

lots

real time assignable knobs, just a few maybe

sampleandhold wrote:i would like to be able to set up multiple filters on a sample.

Word.

>>Real--time assignable knobs: The Launch--Pad has four, add that to say a cheap DX--7 or something and you have 6+.
>>Real time time stretching...I do that with Recycle but it would be great!
>>Spectrum Analysis would be fuckin great and would omit the need to shuttle your samples to a wave editor first!
>>Totally agree on the filters, vocoder etc etc.
>>Would love to see some more esoteric effects included with the RFX, something akin to PSI warp by Prosoniq, VST's GRM Tools, Native's Spektral Delay etc
>>A mike preamp?!#

The processor is RISC anyway. Some may argue that this is an inherently faster system architecture than simply adding a 2G processor or the like...it is a purpose built tool...

A quote from Steve Hoge from E--MU as recent as July:



I may be going out on a limb here, but I don't believe that there are yet
any host-based ("soft") samplers or synths out there that have the
*effective* DSP horsepower of the current top-end 128-voice EOS sampler -
especially if you include an RFX-32 subsystem :-)

If you compare raw compute bandwidth between today's top-end CPUs (4GHZ
P4 or 2+GHZ PPC970) you'll see what looks like viable parity between
these platforms. But that's not a particularly realistic way to view
their comparative performance as synth engines. In the real world, the
host CPUs are almost never programmed in hand-optimized, straightline
assembly language, so their integer and/or floating pt computational
units sit idle during a surprisingly high percentage of clock cycles.
This is especially true during branch and subroutine execution or
exception processing, when pipelines stall or must be flushed. On top of
that, these CPUs are "burdened" by multitasking operating systems like
Windoze or the MacOS, which, even on a dedicated music-computer can chew
up alot of CPU overhead.

[Remember when you went from a 500MHZ CPU to a 2GHZ CPU? Did your useful
synth voice count quadruple from 32 to 128? I didn't think so.]

On the other hand, the EOS machines use hardware-based synth engines
built from custom music DSP chips, the G (oscillator), H (filter) and R
(effects) chips. These chips have been architected so that peak compute
bandwidth is always available to meet instantaneous demand; the 128
8th-order samplerate converters (pitch shifters) and 128 6th order
"z-plane" filters, their output routed through 1024 sends onto 16 stereo
busses, with the 16 independent effects routed through 16 ADAT channels,
can all be simultaneously utilized without resource contention (ripoff)
or fragmentation.

There's one relatively subtle feature of these hardware chips that is
often taken for granted by users (and often "bites" softsynth
implementations): sample-rate smoothing of parameter updates. Perhaps
15-20 percent of the compute bandwidth of the G and H chips is dedicated
to parameter smoothing hardware (the RChip effects use parameter
smoothing which is microprogrammed per-fx algorithm, thus the specially
designated CC Mod parameters.) If changes to the GChip's SR conversion
ratio (when you lean into the pitch bend) or HChip's filter coefficients
(when you wang the mod wheel) were not being smoothly interpolated in
hardware at the 48KHZ sample rate, you would hear "grainy" distortion and
the zipper-noise artifacts which are sometimes audible from soft synth
engines under high load.

Another "corner" that is often cut by soft synth engines is that when
their performance demands increase they will fall back to something less
than their highest-quality sample rate conversion algorithm. Typically,
this means using simple linear interpolation on some or all channels when
high voice counts are required. While the artifacts of this optimization
can be painfully obvious when transposing complex signals across a wide
musical range, in fact, under many real-world situations this is actually
a very smart move. This is because a lot of today's computer-based music
making simply involves playing back samples at their original (unity)
pitch, without transposition. In these applications, the high-quality
samplerate conversion built into each of the Ultra's 128 voices is
essentially wasted.

The trend towards music making by playing back many voices at unity or
near-unity pitch has coincided with the availability of hugely capacious
and cheap primary (RAM) and secondary (disk) storage in today's host
computers. With this "giga" style of music making, the Ultra's
high-quality, wide-range samplerate conversion offers little advantage,
and the G-chip is doubly penalized by its relatively limited 64Msample
address space. (Trust me, this seemed to E-mu like an unbelievable
amount of sample RAM when the chip was designed 10 years ago.)

On another front, recent moves towards frequency-domain (FFT) techniques
for pitch shifting, especially with formant preservation, pose a
legitimate challenge to the Ultra's "old school" pitch shifting
algorithms, which are based in the time domain. Using frequency domain
algorithms for synthesis opens up a huge frontier of possibilities for
music making and sound manipulation, but (with some significant
exceptions) these techniques are still mostly being utilized on host
computers with the same sets of performance limitations that apply to
time-domain techniques.

In the near future I think you'll see these frequency-domain techniques
moving from host CPUs back onto dedicated DSP hardware in mass-market
products. And while that probably means faster and better, it doesn't
necessarily mean CHEAPER. The commodity economics of personal computers,
which are effectively killing the current generation of hardware
samplers, will still dominate the debate over "hard" vs "soft" musical
instruments.

I think that an akai aksys style software and usb are the most needed features are needed and maybe a 16 audio channel firewire connection would be nice, but as creative labs ownz emu Its very unlikely I have been trying to get some stuff for my 6400 and its very hard to get them to even bother responding to you, cimple solutions who are the uk repair center for emu can't even get parts to easily and they should have high priority, so thats what were up against hardware is far better but the intergration with computers is greatly let down. I also have an akai 5000 and i think in someways its better as its made to speak to the computer well, but is let down by the routing possibilitys that the emu has. Its such a shame that emu have be taken over by such a crap company for producing music , they are more mass market and margins are the only thing they care about.

Hoo--ray, I wish I had that piece of writing from Emu when I was trying to sell people on the EOS,

1: able to use the 16 outputs i have as 16 independent mono outputs as opposed to simply 8 stereo outs
2: more processor cards for more horsepower, along the lines of the rfx card
3: use as many filters as you want at a time on 1 preset
4: firewire connection to mac/pc to track right into a computer without needing an outboard audio interface for their computers, making it as easy to track stuff you've just done as it is with native softsamplers/DAW host programs, turning the sampler into an audio interface (like it's already also been turned into an effects machine)
5: a nord modular style computer front end for sample organization and editing and control, like getting the nice gui interface of a softsampler, with the sheer muscle of the emu sampler (and the godly z plane filters).

Fix Bugs esp RFX sample phase problem.

then

1. Sample accurate sample start (sstart).
2. Sloop to cover a greater distance and have assignable start and end markers.
3. Proper beat region truncation to replace beatmunger.
4. Lots of template presets in Rom, dont know why they didn't do this from the start (maybe emusonacid folk could post their favourites somewhere??)
5. Wave generator for single cycles
6. RFX sysex - please!!!
7. Mod for memory slots so we could have more. Hmm compact flash instead
8. Straight to SCSI Hard disk recording.
9. Batch procssing in sample edit.
10. Firewire or USB for additional drives and easier mac/pc connection.
11. Quicker LFOs so they can reach a decent FM speed.

Nice to see alot of people agreeing on a few things.

here is another one or two... but i suppose you could do it in the matrix mod... maybe.

have a realtime doppler effect that you can apply to your samples... even loops.(single cycle loops.. oh yes) have it possible to change the amount of stereo movement and doppler effect by using a mod wheel, velocity, lfo's or whatever else you could use. also, have the option to repeat the effect over and over again, like a retrigger.

it would also be neat, perhaps i am missing it in the matrix mod.. but i would like to beable to retrigger the envelopes so they loop, or retrigger a section of the envelope.

def mutiple filters per voice,just two would be great,
what about an intergrated cd-rom drive/burner?
beats the hell outta that useless soddin floppy drive!!